Welcome to the Virtual Presentations area!
We will upload here short and long talks presented at the BrainCrit 2024 conference, as soon as they become ready for publishing. For virtual posters check here.
Day #1 – Wednesday November 6th 2024 | Day #2 | Day #3
INVITED TALKS
Coming soon…
Spotlight talks
Spotlight 2024 – Day1 – #1 | Xiaowen CHEN – Extended Anderson Criticality in Heavy-Tailed Neural Networks
By Xiaowen Chen (École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France). November 6th, 2024. Animal behavior occurs on time scales much longer than the response times of individual neurons. In many cases, it is plausible that these long time scales emerge from the recurrent dynamics of electrical activity in networks of neurons. In linear models, time scales are set by the eigenvalues of a dynamical matrix whose elements measure the strengths of synaptic connections between neurons. It is…
Spotlight 2024 – Day1 – #2 | Chaitanya CHINTALURI – What is the snow in a neural avalanche?
By Chaitanya Chintaluri (Institute of Science and Technology, Austria). November 6th, 2024. Neurons spike spontaneously in many experimental settings. Such firing patterns are often characterized by prolonged periods of silence followed by an unknown trigger of spontaneous activity that propagates throughout the slice. These were dubbed `neural avalanches’ as they resemble avalanches in which accumulated snow rapidly flows down a mountain slope. Expanding this analogy –if the network connectivity is equivalent to the mountain slope,…
Spotlight 2024 – Day1 – #3 | – Cédric STEFENS – Mesoscopic multiphoton calcium imaging reveals a confluence of overlapping avalanches with varying distance to criticality and distinct roles
By Cédric Stefens (Imperial College, London, UK). November 6th, 2024. The hypothesis that information processing properties emerge at this critical point has been of interest in neuroscience, inspiring a phenomenological framework for analysis of “neural avalanches” of activity that propagate with power-law distributions of size and duration. One important limitation of previous studies is the assumption of at most a single avalanche at any time. Yet, in a system as large as the brain, it…
Spotlight 2024 – Day1 – #4 | – Hardik RAJPAL – Differences in the scaling of spatial Information-processing signatures in mouse cortex
By Hardik Rajpal (Imperial College, London, UK). November 6th, 2024. The hypothesis that information processing properties emerge at this critical point has been of interest in neuroscience, inspiring a phenomenological framework for analysis of “neural avalanches” of activity that propagate with power-law distributions of size and duration. One important limitation of previous studies is the assumption of at most a single avalanche at any time. Yet, in a system as large as the brain, it…
Day #1 | Day #2 – Thursday November 7th 2024 | Day #3
INVITED TALKS
Coming soon…
Spotlight talks
Spotlight 2024 – Day2 – #1 | – Gregory LEPEU – The critical dynamics of hippocampal seizures
By Grégory LEPEU (Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland). November 7th, 2024. Epilepsy is defined by the abrupt emergence of harmful seizures, but the nature of these regime shifts remains enigmatic. From the perspective of dynamical systems theory, such critical transitions occur upon inconspicuous perturbations in highly interconnected systems and can be modeled as mathematical bifurcations between alternative regimes. The predictability of critical transitions represents a major challenge, but the theory predicts the appearance of subtle dynamical…
Spotlight 2024 – Day2 – #2 | – Sheng WANG – Assessing Seizure Risk in a Low-Dimensional Latent Space Derived from Brain Criticality Biomarkers
By Sheng H. Wang (CEA/NeuroSpin & Inria/MIND, France; University of Helsinki & Aalto University.). November 7th, 2024. Identifying the epileptogenic zone (EZ) for epilepsy surgery is challenging due to the unique complexity of each patient’s pathology. We have shown that individual EZs may encompass synchronized components with high-dimensional (high-D) criticality features. However, high feature dimensionality can complicate the training of machine learning (ML) models for automated EZ localization. We hypothesized that, despite its apparent high…
Spotlight 2024 – Day2 – #3 | – Damián DELLAVALE – Linking neuronal avalanches with oscillatory and broadband 1/f activities in the resting human brain
By Damián Dellavale (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Departamento de Física Médica (DFM), Instituto de Nanociencia y Nanotecnología (INN), Centro Atómico Bariloche (CAB)). November 7th, 2024. Brain oscillations, broadband 1/f activity and neuronal avalanches (NAs) are valuable conceptualizations extensively used to interpret brain data, yet, these perspectives have mainly progressed in parallel with no current consensus on a rationale linking them. This study aims to reconcile these viewpoints.We analyzed NAs in source-reconstructed…
Spotlight 2024 – Day2 – #4 | – Davide CONTE – Inferring Global Exponents in Subsampled Neural Systems from Power Spectrum and DFA
By Davide Conte (University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy). November 7th, 2024. Understanding criticality in neural networks is essential for deciphering brain function and detecting pathological deviations. However, neural recordings often capture only a small fraction of the system, meaning that the local, subsampled behaviour may not accurately reflect global dynamics. In this study, we investigate two stochastic models, the mean field branching process and the (2+1)-dimensional directed percolation, to assess how subsampling affects…
Day #1 | Day#2 | Day #3 – Friday November 8th 2024
INVITED TALKS
Coming soon…
Spotlight talks
Spotlight 2024 – Day3 – #1 | – Bryan DANIELS – Neural tuning for perceptual decisions
By Bryan Daniels (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ). November 8th, 2024. While drift-diffusion models are known to be good at explaining decision dynamics at a coarse scale, there is still no consensus about the detailed neural mechanisms that produce these dynamics. Data from macaque cortical neurons shows that a perceptual decision appears to occur in two phases: slow accumulation followed by fast consensus. We find that accumulation dynamics can be produced by critical slowing near…
Spotlight 2024 – Day3 – #2 | – Antonio FONTENELE – Neuromodulatory control of critical brain dynamics
By Antonio Fontenele (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR). November 8th, 2024. It has long been suggested that the brain operates near the critical point of a phase transition. However, the mechanisms by which the brain mediates this criticality remain poorly understood. In this study, we propose that the arousal system acts as a key biological mechanism facilitating this critical transition. To test this hypothesis, we applied a temporal renormalization group (tRG) analysis in both mouse…
Spotlight 2024 – Day3 – #4 | – Afshin MONTAKHAB – Criticality and phase transition in a network model of neuronal dynamics with synaptic plasticity
By Afshin Montakhab (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California). November 8th, 2024. In this work, we study a discrete probabilistic neuron-based model on a random network governed by specific dynamic rules to investigate potential phase transitions, including absorbing, synchronization, and chaotic transitions. The primary objective is to determine how these transitions contribute to the emergence of criticality. We first identify the associated transition points and investigate the model’s collective dynamics at such transitions.…